Tangy Greek Salad

I’ve been throwing dinners together lately for no other reason than lack of time. Most of them have been last minute results of inspiration and perhaps a bit of kitchen chaos. This salad was the result of a more planned approach.

I saw the base recipe for this at my local Publix grocer in one of the little Aprons recipe cards. It brought back memories when I was in the NAVY and doing my three months of galley time. All enlisted service members have to do their galley time. I was lucky enough to be on a small boat, no more than 270 crew, which afforded us the luxury of cooking with a bit more leisure. Eggs were made to order, pancakes made fresh and always plenty of left overs.

Being as I love to cook, I used to toss together a chef salad and make pretty lattice designs with the cheese. Other days I would whip together a tangy salad of cucumbers, tomatoes, onions all tosses and marinated with a concoction of water, vinegar, spices. I never really measured anything, just threw it together for the crew. The longer it sat the better it tasted.

The crew loved it as I recall. I didn’t always cook, we rotated out and some days I would wash dishes, clean the galley but I did get to cook more than not. Not shortly after the breakfast bell first plodding of military work boots would come down the ladder and it was always nice when the first words of the morning from my fellow crew members were “YES, Escher is cooking!”. I loved cooking for them as I do my family and I loved knowing they liked what I dished out.

So back to this little salad.

The base recipe called for just cucumber, onion and tomatoes, but never one to leave a recipe alone, I tossed in some kalamata olives and a little garlic to spice things up. The rest is a no brainier with some greek salad dressing and I actually had greek spice on hand.

I have to be honest, I’m not one to eat cucumbers after a day in the fridge once their sliced; they tend to lose that snap that makes them so loveable. They also get watery. This little dish was an exception and I ate the rest of it the next day. After a night of sitting in it’s greek sauce, mmmmmm, it was so tangy!

It was made as a side dish for this amazing greek fish but was great as a lunch too. The whole thing takes 10 minutes to put together.

So this is for you and my old service crewmates. Would love to cook for them again.